A Look Inside The Yankee Universe (and around the world of baseball)

One More for the Road

The Yankees finished their first road trip of the season at 4-2, despite losing the first game in each series.

AJ Burnett delivers one fo the 92 pitches he needed to earn his first victory of the season.

In their brief history, the Rays have never won an April series against the Yankees.

A.J. Burnett yielded only two runs in seven innings to earn his first win of the season. Both runs scored in the first innings, thanks in large part to stolen bases by Jason Bartlett and Carl Crawford. The Yankees have now surrendered 9 stolen bases on 9 attempts.

Burnett only needed 92 pitches to get through his seven innings. Uncharacteristically, he also only recorded one strikeout, making it only the third time that Burnett pitched at least 7 innings and struck out one or fewer (but second against the Rays). On September 29, 1999, Burnett didn’t record a single strikeout in 7 innings against the Expos, and then on August 17, 2006, he only struck out one batter against the then Devil Rays.

Despite winning the game, the ball wasn’t bouncing the Yankees way. In the bottom of the 6th inning, Evan Longoria skied a pop-up that started off behind the plate, but hit a cat walk and landed safely in fair territory. Joe Girardi argued that the ball should have been called foul, but the Tropicana Dome grounds rules seemed to support the umpire’s decision.

The Yankees were on the wrong end of another umpire’s call in the bottom of the 7th. Dioner Navarro popped a ball up into shallow center that landed into the sliding glove of Curtis Granderson. Second base umpire James Hoy ruled that the ball bounced, however, and Navarro was awarded first base.

The sliding grab would have been Granderson’s second of the game. Two innings earlier, he made a similar grab on a sinking liner, once again hit by Navarro. After making the catch, Granderson leapt to his feet and doubled Pat Burrell, who had been running on the pitch, off of first. In his attempt to get back to the bag safely, Burrell slid hard into Teixeira, who briefly voiced his displeasure. In the dugout, Burrell could be seen saying that he was hoping the ball would hit him.

The two big hits in the game were Jorge Posada’s 2-run HR off of Randy Choate in the 6th inning as well as Alex Rodriguez 2-run double off of Lance Cormier in the 8th. Arod’s double was his second of the game, both of which just missed sailing over the fence. Arod has now had 4 doubles that just missed going out of the park.

Derek Jeter, Nick Swisher and Robinson Cano have now hit safely in all six games played this season.